They cut off their GPS bracelets. They let them run out of power. Or they just ignore them.

Time and again, criminals have proven that GPS monitoring devices are only as dependable as the convicts wearing them.

Yet marketing campaigns and election hyperbole pitch GPS as a boon to public safety. In Florida, California and other states, paroled sex offenders are required to wear the ankle bracelets as a deterrent to keep them from re-offending.

But a nationwide review by the Register of GPS abuse found dozens of cases of child molestation, rape and even killings of police officers committed by those being monitored. Crime victims, police officers, attorneys and registered sex offenders talked about weaknesses in the system.

GPS “is a joke and the joke is on us,” said Linda Whitfield of Helena-West Helena, Ark., who counsels a gang-rape victim whose attackers wore monitors.

Statistically, GPS monitoring is promising. One study funded by the National Institute of Justice shows that 14 percent of California parolees on GPS committed another crime, compared with 26 percent without the device.

But statistics are little comfort to the 16-year-old girl kidnapped and raped in Tacoma, Wash., by a registered sex offender who let the battery drain on his GPS.

Or the 14-year-old girl gang-raped in Arkansas by four boys, two of whom were wearing GPS bracelets while on bail for earlier crimes.

Or the families of four Lakewood, Wash., police officers killed by an ex-con who took off his GPS in a bid to ambush cops.

The devices earned renewed scrutiny with the case of Steven Gordon and Franc Cano, two GPS-wearing transients accused in April of killing four women in Orange County.

Even when wearers are diligent, the devices suffer mechanical problems. Or the companies monitoring the bracelets sometimes fail to alert parole officers of red flags.

These are accounts of the dangers of relying on GPS monitoring:

A Dead Battery

The kidnapper’s knife pressed the girl’s ribs as she entered the dirty attic, expecting to see starved women chained to the walls.

But there were no other women. Instead, there were ratty blankets and trash lit by a small flashlight held by the kidnapper, a 350-pound man with brown hair pulled back into a greasy ponytail. He sat next to his 16-year-old prey, rolling cigarettes, bragging about the people he had tortured and killed.

A GPS tracking device hugged his ankle from an earlier kidnapping conviction for which he spent nearly four years in prison. But the battery had died hours earlier. Now the GPS was a worthless piece of plastic offering little protection to the girl whisked off a blackened street in Tacoma, Wash., on July 12, 2012.

It was 3:20 a.m. And registered sex offender Henry William Hauser Jr. was off the grid.

Sex And Drugs

Hauser, 45, was a transient who lived in an old Buick parked outside his father’s house, according to police reports obtained by the Register.

Hauser wanted more than sex that night from his victim, with a history of prostitution and a sixth-grade education. He wanted to party.

Putting some crystal meth into a long glass pipe, Hauser handed the contraption to the teenager. She cried, saying she didn’t want to smoke. But, according to police reports, Hauser threatened to kill her if she didn’t “hit it.”

So she did. Sixteen times. She hit it so hard, she told police, she didn’t care what happened.

That, according to the crime report, is when Hauser raped her, with a knife to her throat. When it was over, he did something so surprising, so unexpected, that the girl couldn’t believe it. He punched his cellphone number into her iPod and told her to call him if anybody ever bothered her.

Then he drove her home.

The girl took the number to police. Hauser is back in prison in Washington state. But not because of his GPS device.

“The bottom line is you have a bracelet that doesn’t zap you if you take it off. There’s no real penalty for you,” said Tacoma police Officer Loretta Cool. “It’s kind of an honor system.”

Gang Rape

When the bullet pierced his chest, Arkansas radio station owner Elijah Mondy realized he had been duped.

Mondy, 67, was driving one night in April 2013 when he spotted a boy lying on the darkened roadway. Mondy stopped and flung open his door. Then he noticed more boys running toward his car. One carried a gun. It was a carjacking.

Mondy said he was shot before he could close the door. Police arrested some boys, and at least one, Leontarius Reed, 16, was let out on bail and fitted with a GPS monitor.

Three months later, Reed’s friend Brandon Bates, 15, was caught burglarizing a home – after waving at the resident while she drove away. Bates was fitted with a GPS for the break-in.

Both Reed and Bates were wearing their monitors when they and another teenage boy allegedly raped a 14-year-old girl in the men’s room of a Helena-West Helena, Ark., dental office in August 2013. All of the teens were at the office for dental work.

“I think it’s terrible when you got those people committing those kinds of crimes and they got their ankle monitors,” said Linda Whitfield, 56, who mentors the young rape victim. Whitfield says the girl is going to counseling and seems to be doing okay.

“Those devices are not working,” Whitfield said. “They let the wolf reign over the chicken coop.”

Mondy doesn’t much care for GPS devices, either.

“There’s now a lot of people in town who don’t like them,” Mondy said. “If (the suspects) had been kept in jail, that girl would not have been raped.”

“A Creep”

The way James Edward Norkin tells it, he was blitzed on alcohol and had not slept for four days when he settled into the back seat of an Orange County bus for a nap in June 2010. A homeless registered sex offender, Norkin was strapped with a GPS ankle bracelet.

A GPC device veteran, he had cut one device off. He let another monitor’s battery drain. But he had learned his lesson after being constantly sent back to jail.

So he was wearing his GPS fully charged when he said he fell asleep aboard the bus – and woke up with his hand on the leg of a 14-year-old girl.

In a jailhouse interview, Norkin said, “I was out of it. I didn’t know she was a young girl ... I hate being the creep. I’ve spent my life trying to do the right thing.”

Norkin pleaded guilty to three counts of child molestation for allegedly touching the girls leg, torso and chest. He finally stopped when a friend of the girl yelled at him.

By the time police tracked him down, he was already back in state prison on another parole violation.

Norkin said sex offenders should be sent to states where there is a lot of work for single men such as Alaska or South Dakota.

“Banishment, especially if they don’t have an address,” Norkin said. “I don’t want to be where I’m not wanted.”

He said he has had to get creative to charge his GPS, plugging in at Starbucks while trying to hide from management or plugging in at car washes after they close for the day.

When asked if the GPS is a deterrent to re-offending, Norkin fell silent.

One time, a bus transfer took him too close to a forbidden zone. He said he got sent back to prison. Another time, he was washing clothes at a laundromat that was in front of a school – he got sent back for that too, he said.

“I think I finally lost it there,” he said about the crime on the Orange County Transportation Authority bus. “This is out in public. You are going crazy. You want your privacy.”

“Great Tool”

Jason Michael Olivas, 41, has been in trouble since he was 11.

His arms are sleeved in tattoos. The names of his two daughters are inked on his eyelids.

He started stealing bicycles, then cars. He committed robberies and finally was sent to prison for molesting his 11-year-old niece – a crime he still denies committing. Olivas says he took the fall for a lookalike relative.

Interviewed at the West Valley Detention Center in Rancho Cucamonga, Olivas says one of the few things that kept him clean was the GPS device he periodically wore around his ankle. He credits the GPS for keeping him out of trouble from 2008, when he was released on the molestation conviction, to 2010, when he was arrested on suspicion of molesting another 11-year-old girl.

He was wearing the GPS at the time of the second molestation.

In an unusual twist, Olivas, in a jailhouse interview, said the GPS could exonerate him by showing he was nowhere near the girl at the time of the crime.

But his defense attorney, who did not return messages, failed to order the tracking data and Olivas was found guilty of lewd conduct with a child, he said.

“GPS is a great tool,” he said about the device as a deterrent, “unless you are stupid.”

“Knock, Knock, Knock, Boom”

Ex-convict Maurice Clemmons was counting on his GPS device in a scheme to ambush police.

He cut the device off his leg, according to published reports, and waited with guns ready for the police to arrive at his Washington state home.

Clemmons called the plan, “knock, knock, knock, boom.”

But the police didn’t come. But Clemmons didn’t give up his plan to kill cops.

On the morning of Nov. 29, 2009, he walked, guns blazing, into a Parkland coffee shop where four Lakewood officers were working on their laptops before their shift.

Clemmons killed all four officers before escaping with a getaway driver – launching a major manhunt. Clemmons was finally killed in a gunbattle with Seattle police two days into the search.

Attorney Jack Connelley, who represented the families, said monitoring is key to using the GPS.

“Like any tool, it has its limitations,” Connelley said, “There needs to be consequences for their removal.”

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